I am a first year computer science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus. I am looking forward to working for KDE for the GSoC.

My project idea is based on solving a problem all file managers have had for years - the lack of an easy to use file selection tool. My project aims to simplify selecting files from multiple directory trees.

I am running a survey to gauge community feedback on my idea and to finalize the user interface and features list.

KDE Project:

Recently the question was asked in the KDE forums how we handle advanced settings. While there is neither a best practice nor a common approach in KDE software, we actually discussed a similar concept in respect to the Plasma control modules (KCM).

The updated organization of KCMs was implemented by the developers, the community decided about the basic layout, and a couple of proposals were done [1, 2]. So why don't generalize this idea and write a guideline?

The following guideline proposal not only recapitulates what we considered for the KCM but also introduces some new ideas. There is first of all the import/export function. The use case for this function is a system backup where you may want to store application settings too. While installing software is a piece of cake you waste much time to get back your previous look and feel ...read more...

As expected, Calligra 2.9.11 is only a bugfix release, and it is here to improve the overall performance and compatibility of the office suite used by numerous GNU/Linux users on their KDE desktop environments.

Just a small update on the Call for Speakers for the OpenStack Austin summit. The submission period was extended. The new deadline is February 2nd, 2016,11:59 PM PST (February 3rd, 8:59 CEST). You can find more information about the submission and speaker selection process here.

Ansible does support Windows with an entire set of modules. Thus it is also possible to run Ansible playbooks targeting Windows systems right from Ansible Tower. However, since Windows does works via WinRM and not SSH, the appropriate variables must be set in the definition of the inventory of the machine:

The given screenshot shows the variables for Ansible 1.9. For 2.0 and above the variables are a bit different. Also, keep in mind that you might need to create an additional set of credentials.

When the streets are covered with snow and ice in many parts of Europe, it’s a good time to sit inside in front of our computers and to improve that software we are sharing here with each other. With the porting of the apps, plugins & libs part of Calligra to Qt5/KF5 roughly done towards the end of 2015, it is now also a good time to work on features again.

Given a few Calligra developers interested in improving the text-handling modules, we looked into doing a developer meeting (a.k.a. “sprint”) on that quickly, and given January being a good candidate for snow and ice on the streets, we scheduled it for the 4th week-end of January, so the one that just passed. In the end it was just three of us who could make it, but small can be also better :)

A big share of time of the sprint was invested into spreading knowledge about the current text-layout system by its architect Camilla, by explaining and discussing the current design and code. To apply, ...read more...

Earlier this week, the loved one of a man I used to babysit was pushed into the path of an oncoming subway train car, by a stranger, and soon after died of their injuries. While the death seems random, even cruelly so, it's one of many like it: Every year, people die on Berlin's various railways.

Plasma 5 comes with a very cool feature: KWin can set a different colour scheme for title bar of each app (basing on app identity or title of the window). For example, in the image below you can see Gwenview, Dolphin, Ksysguard and Kate each one with a different colour for its title bar:

This has interesting consequences on consistency of third party apps (web apps included) and we’ll see it below. Before that let’s see how to apply a custom colour for each app.

1. In System Settings > Colours: save your current colour scheme (to re-apply it later), switch from “scheme” tab to “colours” tab and edit the colours of active and inactive window title bar:

2. Save the new colour scheme with your app name (in the example “Dolphin”) and restore your previous colour scheme:

Plasma 5 comes with a very cool feature: KWin can set a different colour scheme for title bar of each app (basing on app identity or title of the window). For example, in the image below you can see Gwenview, Dolphin, Ksysguard and Kate each one with a different colour for its title bar:

This has interesting consequences on consistency of third party apps (web apps included) and we’ll see it below. Before that let’s see how to apply a custom colour for each app.

1. In System Settings > Colours: save your current colour scheme (to re-apply it later), switch from “scheme” tab to “colours” tab and edit the colours of active and inactive window title bar:

2. Save the new colour scheme with your app name (in the example “Dolphin”) and restore your previous colour scheme:

There are many ways to install and run ownCloud. What is best depends on your situation but some general rules of thumb can be given.

Use ownCloud Provided Packages If You Can

The best solution from a security and stability point of view are the official ownCloud packages, provided you have the basic know-how needed to run your own Linux server.

Packages give you the advantage of a relatively clean and easy upgrade process, with the ownCloud team taking care of any special steps which have to be taken. The upgrade itself will still have to be kicked off by the system administrator (see our latest update) but you won't risk forgetting to remove old files, correcting file permissions and so on.

We do not recommend using distribution packages, for several reasons:

First, there will inevitably be a lag between what distributions ship and what we make available.

Christian recently blogged about a small command line tool that added to the client demo application a bunch of useful functionality for interacting with Akonadi Next from the command line. This inspired me to reach into my hard drive and pull out a bit of code I'd written for a side project of mine last year and turn up the Akonadi Next command line to 11. Say hello to akonadish.

akonadish supports all the commands Christian wrote about, and adds:

piping and file redirect of commands for More Unix(tm)

able to be used in stand-alone scripts (#!/usr/bin/env akonadish style)

Here's a quick demo of it I recorded this evening (please excuse my stuffy nose ... recovering from a Christmas cold):

We feel this will be a big help for developers, power users and system administrators alike; in fact, we could have used a tool exactly like this for Akonadi with a client just this month ... alas, this only exists for Akonadi Next.

Five years ago, the Free Software Foundation announced The Unarchiver as a free tool to extract RARv3 archives. In that blog post, you can notice how the FSF hoped that existing GUI extraction tools like Ark would integrate support for The Unarchiver. That’s because The Unarchiver‘s GUI is only available on Mac OS, while on Linux there are only the CLI frontends (which are lsar to list an archive and unar to unpack an archive).

Currently, Ark requires two non-free utilities to handle RAR archives: unrar to open and extract an existing RAR, and rar to create a RAR archive from scratch. This is a problem for many Linux distributions. For instance, Ubuntu and Fedora don’t ship unrar in their default repositories, and so does Debian. Slackware does not ship neither rar not unrar.

A patch from Luke Shumaker introduced basic support for The Unarchiver, but it was never accepted upstream due to a couple of annoying limitations. Fedora ...read more...

I think I spent nearly five years GPG-Free. When I was with the FSFE, I know I spent some time fiddling with the smartcard variant, even. But then I spent a long time working in places where secure communications meant talking in the hallways and secure electronic commuications wasn’t relevant at all. In those five years, only Ingo once sent me an encrypted message; I’ve now finally replied to it.

Because yes, I’ve gone back and unearthed my GPG keys from old backups, and once more can use FEA2A3FE for communications, just like I did in 2002.

Back in 2011, when the AppStream meeting in Nürnberg had just happened, I published the DEP-11 (Debian Extension Project 11) draft together with Michael Vogt and Julian Andres Klode, as an approach to implement AppStream in Debian.

Back then, the FTPMasters team rejected the suggestion to use the official XML specification, and so the DEP-11 specification was adapted to be based on YAML instead of XML. This wasn’t much of a big deal, since the initial design of DEP-11 was to be a superset of the AppStream specification, so it wasn’t meant to be exactly like AppStream anyway. AppStream back then was only designed for applications (as in “stuff that provides a .desktop file”), but with DEP-11 we aimed for much more: DEP-11 should also describe fonts, drivers, pkg-config files and other metadata, so in the end one would be able to ask the package manager meaningful questions like “is the firmware of device X installed?” or request actions such ...read more...

digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0 beta2. This version is the second public release of the new main digiKam version and is a result of the long development process by the team.

Marco has come over to the Netherlands to pay me a visit, and to hack a little bit together, in person. So with the weather clearly suggesting to stay inside, that’s what we did over the weekend, and how better to entertain yourself than to work on mobile software?

Marco has been working for a while on components that follow Plasma’s human interface guidelines and make it easy to implement applications with a common navigation pattern and look and feel. Obviously, these components use a lot of Plasma under the hood, so they get excellent integration at a visual and at a technical level. This high integration, however, comes at the price of having a non-trivial chain of dependencies. That’s not a problem om Plasma Mobile, or other Plasma workspaces, since all that is already there, anyway. We thought that an interesting exercise would be to find out what really defines a “Plasma application”, and how we can make the concepts we engrained in their design available to application developers more easily. How hard ...read more...

Today an exciting new crowdfunding campaign kicks off! Nathan Lovato, the author of Game Design Quest, wants to create a new series of video tutorials on creating 2D game art with Krita. Nathan is doing this on his own, but the Krita project, through the Krita Foundation, really wants this to happen! Over to Nathan, introducing his campaign:

“There are few learning resources dedicated to 2d game art. With Krita? Close to none. That is why I started working on Game Art Quest. This training will show you the techniques and concepts game artists use in their daily work. If you want to become a better artist, this one is for you.”

“We are developing this project together with the Krita Foundation. This is an opportunity for Krita to reach new users and to sparkle the interest of the press. However, for this project to come to life, we need your help. A high quality training series requires months of full-time work to create. That is why we are crowdfunding it on ...read more...

Since last few weeks I was working on the Lockscreen integration with KWin Wayland session, this is most important bit of the Plasma on Wayland session. Currently in X11 lockscreen is managed by ksmserver (KDE’s session manager). It suffers from various security problems which are mentioned on blog post by Martin Gräßlin. This blog post also mentions that in Wayland lockscreen functionality should be moved in kwin_wayland, so that compositor is aware that screen is locked, what windows are owned by greeter, and what should get input events.

To provide screenlocker integration in kwin_wayland, KWin needs to link to kscreenlocker library. Which was being built as static library in plasma-workspace. To avoid dependency loop kscreenlocker was split into different repository to which ksmserver in plasma-workspace and kwin_wayland can depend upon. Next, kwin_wayland was adjusted to start KSldApp (stands for KScreenlocker Daemon Application). As a result, we had beautiful lockscreen on wayland session!

However, this was not really secure.. one can just Alt+Tab the screenlocker. oops!

Since last few weeks I was working on the Lockscreen integration with KWin Wayland session, this is most important bit of the Plasma on Wayland session. Currently in X11 lockscreen is managed by ksmserver (KDE’s session manager). It suffers from various security problems which are mentioned on blog post by Martin Gräßlin. This blog post also mentions that in Wayland lockscreen functionality should be moved in kwin_wayland, so that compositor is aware that screen is locked, what windows are owned by greeter, and what should get input events.

To provide screenlocker integration in kwin_wayland, KWin needs to link to kscreenlocker library. Which was being built as static library in plasma-workspace. To avoid dependency loop kscreenlocker was split into different repository to which ksmserver in plasma-workspace and kwin_wayland can depend upon. Next, kwin_wayland was adjusted to start KSldApp (stands for KScreenlocker Daemon Application). As a result, we had beautiful lockscreen on wayland session!

However, this was not really secure.. one can just Alt+Tab the screenlocker. oops!

Since then it has moved to an official KDE repo http://anongit.kde.org/clazy , got an IRC channel and also many fun new checks. Here's a quick dump of the new features : explicit ComposerLineEdit ; RecipientLineEdit::RecipientLineEdit : ComposerLineEdit <-- oops, passing pointer as firt argument, which is a bool Also, old-style-connect and qstring-ref checks got fixits, so you can fix your code just by recompiling it with clazy.

I was previously working on Macaw-Movies (already in the KDE Community) and, after a while, I felt really alone and wasn’t so sure if a movie organizer still made sense in this all-connected time, where you can stream whatever you are interested in.

I finally went to the Amarok guys, cloned the source and began to help to port it to the Frameworks.

The plan

Aroonav (roguedragon) did his GSoC on this topic [1]. And I catch up at the end of August.

What is the plan? In theory it was this:

Remove all KDELibs from the dependencies

Port the CMakeLists.txt

Get to 100% of build

Start the program without segmentation faults

Port the tests

Release and Party

When sober again, port out of KDELibs4Support

In practice, build 100% is quite hard because as you may know, Amarok has a context part (in the middle by default) that relies comprehensively on Plasma (from KDELibs) and QGraphics(Item|Scene|...). This whole thing must be totally rewritten, from scratch, in QML. And that’s a hell of ...read more...

A new release of digiKam Recipes is ready for your reading pleasure. This version features the Using Album Categories recipe and reworked material on using the tagging functionality in digiKam. As always, the new release includes updates, fixes and tweaks.

QRegExp will cache the string in a Q_GLOBAL_STATIC variable, and remember that because it's a QStringLiteral , it has it's data in .rodata of your KDE library . When you exit the application, your KDE library gets unloaded then QtCore get unloaded.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as “CrossDesktop DevRoom”), which will host Desktop-related talks.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all ...read more...

The KaOS Linux distro is a very efficient Linux distribution built around a refined KDE desktop environment that just keeps getting better. The KDE integration is much more controlled than you will find in other Linux choices.